Could you Put the Pet in a Pot of Peat

Good afternoon. I realise it's been a while, again. Alas the perils of working and it being the new year I have been dragged into doing an awful lot of stuff. Whilst doing said stuff though my creative juices began to trickle.
I came up with a fun little game that I have found to be useful with my Spanish learners. It also adds a bit of a giggle to the class, which is always nice.

So what I do is: Using the super fun animations function on PowerPoint I make lists ten of 1 syllable words appear at 3 minute intervals. The first one I use to explain the activity.
Each of the words has to start and end in the same consenent sound or one, in Spain's case V and B, that frequently get confused.  Change the vowel sound.
Next up write numbers 0 -9 underneath the words. Make sure they understand and can pronounce the words.
Then tell them your phone number, passport number, inmate number (or something similar) using only the words. They have to then see if they got your number right.
The next step you should bring the next list of words up onto the screen. Do the same with the numbers underneath. then get the students to tell their partners their number.
Continue until everyone has had a turn and you've used all the lists of words. It took me about 20 minutes in total and was a great laugh

Until the next time my friends.

H

Where exactly was the cat sitting?

I must admit my most commonly used sentence over the past seven years is probably; "The Cat Sat on the Mat." I use it when helping students develop their imagination and write a story that is less one dimensional and I use it to show what a difference stress can make to a sentence.

Today I'm going to talk about the latter.

I write this simple sentence out on the board. Next I underline one of the words in the sentence and get the students to stress said word. Almost immediately stdents pick up on the difference the stres can make. 

For example. The CAT sat on the mat. The stress on the word cat shows us it was a feline creature and not any other beast. 

The cat SAT on the mat. With the stress lying on the verb it shows us that the cat wasn't dancing, nor was she singing and was in fact just having a nice little sit. 

I continue with the other words in the sentence then I get students to write there own sentences and choose a word to stress. Other students have to decipher the meaning and share with the class what the stressed word indicates. 

And that my friends is about that. 

If you want regular updates you can follow me on twitter @sirhofthebomb 

Don´t Talk To Me In That Tone Of Voice

Well hello there. Happy New Year. I trust you all had a wonderful break over the festive period. I most certainly did.  This year I'm going to start by looking more at tone, stress and pronuncian. 

I popped back to the UK for a wedding and to see some family. It finally dawned on me while I was there that English people, or perhaps it´s just my family, use sarcasm to such an extent that a non-native speaker would obviously struggle to even get the jist of a conversation. 
It was at this point I decided to have a look at some ideas as to how we could convey such a vital part of our language to those learning it. 
To respond properly to a native speaker, an EFL learner has to pay attention. 
One of the easiest ways to get this across to non-native speakers is to give a list of 5-10 comments that could be sarcastic or sincere, and change their meaning with your tone. Have your students work in pairs to replicate your tone, and have them practice responding to each other in turns based on their tone. Examples include:

• I just love your outfit today. Are those blue sneakers?
• I can’t wait for my workout today at the gym!
• Eating healthy just makes me feel so good. I really don’t miss cake.

Get students to write a few of their own and then let each students read them aloud in either tone and ask the other students to guess if it´s Sarcastic or sincere. 

So there we go, the first blog of the year. Have fun with it. 

Until the next time.